Tupac’s Posthumous Live Tour

AT first, the virtual Tupac Shakur looked like any other video image. But then he stepped off the screen, gave shout-outs to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, and started working the stage, mike in hand, just like old times. The crowd at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival gasped, then cheered wildly. As a YouTube commenter wrote, it was as if they had “seen a ghost.”

In fact they had. Last week’s appearance — perhaps “apparition” is a better word — of Tupac onstage more than 15 years after he was fatally shot was created using an old-fashioned stage illusion known as “Pepper’s Ghost.” Popularized by John Henry Pepper, a professor of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London, it was used in 1862, in a stage version of Charles Dickens’s “Haunted Man.”

The basic idea is to connect two spaces — one dark, one dim — with an angled mirror. A figure is brightly illuminated in the dark room. The mirror then reflects that image onto a pane of glass in the dim room, where it will seem to float eerily in midair, a technique suited to many a magician’s stage or haunted house. At Coachella, in California, a projector, a Mylar surface and digital technology updated the trick. Although the virtual Tupac was widely referred to as a 3D hologram, he was in fact as flat as a photograph. Only this flat image moved, rapped and seemed to interact with the audience, at one point calling out “Coachella!”

The audio manipulation required for this last touch should be no news to fans of hip-hop, in which samples and digitally looped voices can be made to say just about anything a producer wants them to. And it was fitting that Dr. Dre was the mad doctor of this resurrection, as his career stands right on the fault line between the scritch-scratch D.J. culture of old-school hip-hop and the era of the producer, whose slick sounds are planned in advance in the comfort of a multitrack studio. Still, whatever the musical merit of the performance, it was the visual element — the seeming presence of Tupac onstage — that made such an impression on the audience.

Photo

The stage illusion known as "Pepper's Ghost." Credit
Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Of course, images of Tupac are anything but rare; he has had one of the most remarkable afterlives of any probably dead celebrity. In an age when anyone with curiosity and an Internet connection can ponder his autopsy photograph, theories that he faked his death and is still living off his royalties persist. Our lasting obsession with Tupac has a lot to do with the fact that the murder case has never been solved and with the collective unwillingness of the hip-hop audience to come to terms with his death.

But it also has to do with the fact that Tupac, alive, was a bundle of contradictions — incredible talent, incredible recklessness, ping-ponging between serious political messages and the insistent sirens of thug life. A friend of mine worked on a Tupac video back when the rapper was still with Digital Underground, and he told me this story: The San Francisco police had been hired by the production company to clear an intersection where a scene was to be shot, but to Tupac, these guys were just the local five-0. He started trash-talking and doing all he could to irritate them. The director was understandably upset; why would Tupac treat the cops this way, when all they were doing was making the video shoot possible?

But that’s the way it is with living people, especially people who live large and out loud the way Tupac did. His vulnerabilities — his missteps, his rants, his all-too-human shortcomings — were also a part of his charm and underlay the love his fans still feel for him.

That actual living Tupac, could he have seen the spectacle at Coachella, would probably have approved. After all, he was the guy who always had an even stronger performance in his back pocket, an even better rap left on the cutting-room floor than most artists had in their whole catalog. But the Tupac who walked the stage last week was a thing of digital shreds and patches, animated as much by our dreams as by any visual trickery; he seemed alive only because we like to think of him so.

There’s a rumor that this Tupac “hologram” is going on tour, and that other such reincarnated artists — maybe a virtual John Lennon to sing duets with Paul McCartney — are in the works. But I hope it’s not true; the reanimated dead are never the people they were before. Oh, they sing the same, and rap the same, and have the same distinctive tattoos and hand gestures. But they don’t have the complexity, or the humanity, to really compel our interest. They’re ghosts — ghosts in a new machine, perhaps — but at best they are no more than the shadow of the shadows that they cast upon us, back when they were alive.

Russell A. Potter, the author of the forthcoming novel “Pyg: The Memoirs of Toby, the Learned Pig,” teaches media studies and hip-hop history at Rhode Island College.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 20, 2012, on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Tupac’s Posthumous Live Tour. Today's Paper|Subscribe